“When people pick up books, they see the finished copy,” he told the audience. “They don’t see the five drafts of the book, they don’t see the moment where you weren’t sure if it was going to be a book.”

He added, “It was, in fact, an odyssey.”

During that journey, the book evolved into a deeply personal, unsparing meditation on being an African-American man in a country plagued by racial divisions and inequality. Mr. Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, wrote “Between the World and Me” in part as a tribute to a college friend, Prince Jones, who was shot to death in Maryland in 2000 by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal.

In a phone interview, Mr. Coates, 40, spoke about some of the most meaningful responses to the book he has received, his coming comic book series, and why he doesn’t want to be viewed as a public intellectual. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q. What made you want to become a writer?

A. It wasn’t a decision. I grew up in a house full of books. That was the thing I was most exposed to, and it was the thing I displayed some of my talents at. I wasn’t particularly great at other stuff. This is the one thing I did. I started writing poetry when I was 17. I met David Carr [The New York Times media columnist who died in February] when I was 20, and that introduced me to world of journalism. “Between the World and Me” is really a fusion of those two things. It really reflects my training as a poet. I got the reporting bug when I met David, and I never looked back.

Q. In your acceptance speech, you referred to your frustration and anxiety in writing the book. What were some of the difficulties you confronted?

A. It wasn’t a book. There was no story, no long-form anything. It’s one of the first things I’ve written where it came out of a feeling. There was no arc.

Q: What did you feel you could accomplish through a book like this that you couldn’t achieve through your magazine writing or blogging or your memoir, “The Beautiful Struggle”?

A. I wrote this piece last year called “The Case for Reparations,” and as cool as this piece was, it was very abstract. I wanted to make it a lot more personal. I wanted to take it from the perspective of the individual.

Q. Before “Between the World and Me” was even published, it drew ecstatic blurbs from literary giants like Ms. Morrison, who called it “required reading.” What have been the most memorable and meaningful responses that you’ve gotten to the book?

A. Well, Toni Morrison. Good God. I saw that, and that probably meant the most to me.

Q. More than getting the National Book Award?

A. I think so. All of that came after.

Q. Ms. Morrison and others have compared your writing to Baldwin. How does that comparison make you feel, and is it a weight on you to write your next works under such heightened expectations?

A. Not weighty. I’m just incredibly flattered. That was a wonder.

Q. In your acceptance speech, you dedicated the award to Prince Jones. As you noted, very little has changed in the 15 years since his death except that we now have cellphone cameras capturing some of these acts. Do you think greater awareness of these events, and books like yours, could lead to progress of any kind in terms of reducing the frequency of these episodes? From your speech, it seems that you are not optimistic about change.

A. I just don’t know. I hope so.

Q. The book is composed as a letter to your teenage son, and as a blunt warning to him about the physical risks of being an African-American man in this country. People always hold up future generations as the embodiment of hope and expect their children’s lives to be better than their own, but you seem to want to avoid that pat assumption.

A. I hope his life is better than mine. But there are some quintessential truths about African-American lives that I felt he needed to know.

Q. Has he read the book, and what did he make of it?

A. He’s read drafts of the book. He was very moved by it.

Q. You’ve said before that you don’t want to be a spokesman or representative of an entire group, but this role seems to have been forced on you with the response to the book. The Washington Post called you America’s foremost public intellectual. How are you adjusting to this role?

A. Trying to avoid it as much as I can. I really try to emphasize to people that that is not who I am, this is not why I do what I do. The best part of writing is really to educate yourself. I don’t want to be anybody’s expert. I came in to learn.

Q. Some readers have struggled with the way you emphasize the permanence of racial injustice. Why was it important to you to avoid platitudes about the possibility for change?

A. It’s not your job to make people feel good as a writer. As an artist, your job is to write things as you see them. You’re not an activist.

Q. Some reviewers and critics have also noted that you stress the body over the mind or intellect or spirit in this book. What drove you to emphasize physicality, and what impact were you hoping that would have?

Q. You have a lot of interesting projects in the works, in different mediums, including a Marvel comic series about Black Panther, a black superhero. What made you want to write a comic series?

A. As a young person, I read a ton of comics. That was the seed of so much of the literature that I wrote. I was a pop culture guy and comics were very important to me. I loved Spider-Man. So I’m hoping to learn more about the art form.

Q. You’re also working on a project for HBO with Taylor Branch, James McBride and David Simon, about the civil rights movement. How did that come about?

A. I did it for the same reason as the comic book, to learn about storytelling in another medium. It’s an incredible learning experience.